Thousands of Israelis gathered in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, some cheering and some in tears, as a giant television screen broadcast the first glimpse of the first three hostages to be released under the Gaza ceasefire deal.
They watched as the three women – Romi Gonen, Doron Steinbrecher and Emily Damari – got out of a car in Gaza City and were handed over to Red Cross officials amid a surging crowd that was held back by armed men in camouflaged military gear, with green Hamas headbands.
“I’m excited, I was so nervous, that they would come safe and alive to their mothers’ hands. They were in the hands of terrorists for 471 days, three young women,” said Shay Dickmann, whose cousin was found killed by her Hamas captors in August.
The Israeli military shared video showing their families gathered in what appeared to be a military facility crying out in emotion as they watched footage of the handover to Israeli forces in Gaza before they were brought back into Israel.
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Pictures shared by the families showed the three women embracing their mothers at a reception centre, with Emily Damari beaming broadly and waving a bandaged hand missing two fingers at family on the other end of a mobile phone video call.
After a nerve-racking morning, waiting to hear whether Damari would be one of the three hostages freed on Sunday, her friends breathed a sigh of relief.
“We didn’t have any sign of life from her for a whole year and this is the first time we are seeing her, and we are seeing her walking on her two feet and we are just waiting here to hug her and say how much we love her,” said Guy Kleinberger.
They were later flown to a hospital in Tel Aviv in a helicopter that Israeli media reported was piloted by the head of the Israeli air force.
“Romi, Doron, Emily,” an entire nation embraces you,” prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said.
The release of the three women, the first of 33 hostages due to be freed from Gaza under phase one of the deal, is in exchange for 90 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.
The hostages were taken in one of the most traumatic episodes in Israel’s history, when Hamas gunmen attacked a string of communities around the Gaza Strip in the early hours of October 7th, 2023, killing about 1,200 civilians and soldiers and abducting 251 hostages – men, women, children and elderly.
But amid hope among many Israelis that the six-week ceasefire marks the beginning of the end to the war, there is deep unease about the uncertainty surrounding the remaining 94 hostages still held in the Gaza Strip.
“The ceasefire is something that I hope will work out,” said Tomer Mizrahi, in Sderot, a town in southern Israel within sight of Gaza that was attacked on October 7th. “But as I know Hamas, you cannot even trust them 1 per cent.”
Images of Hamas police emerging on to the streets as the ceasefire took effect underscored how far Israel remains from its originally stated war aims of destroying the Islamist group that has ruled in Gaza since 2007.
“I’m torn,” said Dafna Sharabi from Beit Aryeh-Ofarim, a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. “On the one hand there’s a ceasefire to strengthen the forces, to rest from all the madness, on the other, maybe it’s not the time,” she said.
“They should have been eliminated, wiped out,” she said. “My son was on reserve duty for a year over there ... and he sees all the Gazans returning, Hamas returning its forces to all the places he fought in.”
After 15 months of war, Gaza lies largely in ruins. Israel’s campaign has killed almost 47,000 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian health ministry and displaced most of the two million people who live in the enclave.
But for many in Israel, the war will not be over while Hamas still stands and there have been a series of rallies opposing the ceasefire as a sell-out that abandons men of military age taken captive, who are not in the first batch of 33 hostages.
National security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has already resigned and his fellow hardliner Bezalel Smotrich has also opposed the deal and said he had been reassured that it was not the end of the war.
“We have been waiting for this for a long time. We wanted it to be an absolute victory, I hope we get that absolute victory,” said Shlomi Elkayam, who owns a business in Sderot. “There are pros and cons, but in the end we are tired of it all. We are tired and we want everyone here at home.”
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